Why Are People Different?: Differences YaleCourses

Материал готовится, пожалуйста, возвращайтесь позднее

Professor Paul Bloom: What we've been talking about so far in the course are human universals, what everybody shares. So, we've been talking about language, about rationality, about perception, about the emotions, about universals of development, and we've been talking about what people share. But honestly, what a lot of us are very interested in is why we're different and the nature of these differences and the explanation for them. And that's what we'll turn to today.

So first, we'll discuss how are people different, different theories about what makes you different in a psychological way from the person sitting next to you, and then we'll review different theories about why people are different. And this is the class which is going to bother the most people. It's not dualism. It's not evolution. It's this because the scientific findings on human psychological differences are, to many of us, shocking and unbelievable. And I will just try to persuade you to take them seriously.

Okay. So, how are people different? Well, there's all sorts of ways. Your sexual identity — It is at the core of your being for almost all of us whether you're male or female. How we refer to you in language, what pronoun we use, is indexed on how we — on your — on how — whether you're male or female and related to that though imperfectly is your sexual orientation, who you're attracted to. The question of why some of us think of ourselves as males and others as females, and the question of why some of us would ideally want to have sex with males, others with females, others with both, and then a few others who have harder to define desires, is such a good question that we're going to talk about it after spring break while all the sexual desire has been spent and you could focus on [laughter] on a scientific discussion of this — not that I recommend you do that on spring break.

How happy are you? This is also such a good topic it's going to get its own class. The very last class of the semester is devoted to happiness and the question of what makes people happy, what makes people unhappy, and what makes people differ in their happiness. If I asked you to rank how happy you are from a scale of 1 to 10, the numbers would differ across this room. And there's different theories as to why. Your success and failure in life — This is somewhat interesting because you could study this in more or less objective ways. We don't have to ask people. We could look at your relationships, how they begin, how they end, your job satisfaction. We could look at your criminal records. Some of you are going to see time. Most will not. Some of you will get into little troubles all through your life. Some of you already have seen the inside of a police station, possibly a lineup. Others couldn't go near such a thing. What determines that?

And at the root of all human differences are two main factors. And so, I want to talk about the two main interesting factors. One is personality. The other is intelligence. And this is what — These are the differences I'll talk about today first from the standpoint of how do we characterize them, how do we explain them, and then from the standpoint of why these differences exist in the first place.

One way to characterize personality is in terms of people's style with dealing with — in dealing with the world and particularly their style with dealing — in dealing with other people. So, you take a simple character you know of and you could talk about that person's personality.